Berlin’s WCF backs four films

International productions land coin

BERLIN — The Berlinale World Cinema Fund has selected four feature film projects from Vietnam, Argentina, Mongolia and Turkey in its latest round of production funding.

Diep Nguyen Hoang’s “Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere,” from Vietnamese shingle VBLOCK Media and Germany’s Filmallee, centers on a pregnant teenage girl in Hanoi and the challenges she faces in trying to finance an abortion. The pic secured Euros 50,000 ($64,000) in WCF coin.

Since its establishment in 2004, the WCF has granted production or distribution backing to a total of 106 projects from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia and the Caucasus.

All of the WCF films completed to date have screened in cinemas and/or in international film festivals. This year, seven WCF titles have premiered at international film festivals so far, including Fernando Guzzoni’s “Carne de Perro” from Chile, which received the New Directors Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and Pablo Stoll’s Uruguayan drama “Tres,” which premiered at Cannes before being screened at Munich, Toronto and Amsterdam.

Two WCF films that screened at the Berlinale were selected by their countries of origin as candidates for the 2013 Academy Awards’ best foreign language film: “Death for Sale,” by Morocco’s Faouzi Bensaidi, and Rosario Garcia-Monteros’s “Las Malas intenciones” from Peru.

The World Cinema Fund is an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin Film Festival and is funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in cooperation with the Goethe Institut, and with the support of the Federal Foreign Office.